I’d love your comments on the telecast — and I’ll make sure Gore and his team see what you have to say.

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Former Vice President Gore launched The Climate Reality Project “to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it.”

Tonight at 7 pm Central Time the “24 Hours of Reality” live video stream begins — 24 one-hour presentations from around the world ending with Gore himself in New York  delivering a new PowerPoint presentation.  You can watch it right here.

In an exclusive interview with CP from July, the Nobel laureate explained what you can expect to see if you tune in:

It will cover a 24-hour period. And I’m preparing a brand new 30 minute multimedia presentation.  A keynote slideshow with video and other features that will focus in part on the connection between the extreme weather events all around the world and the climate crisis.  And it will begin on September 14^th, in prime time, central time zone from Mexico City, and then it will move West to the next time zone over, and continue through all 24 time zones, ending the following evening, in  prime time, in New York City where I will give the last of the 24 presentations.

Each site where a presentation originates will have basically the same 30 minute slide show, but with slides used in each time zone that illustrate particular impacts and particular efforts towards solutions at the venue representing  than that time zone.  And then the second thirty minutes of each hour will include a panel discussion focused on the climate crisis and the solutions to it from the perspective of leaders and scientists and others  in that particular location.  So it will be a 24-hour event.

I’ll host it from New York City, but really all 23 of the other presenters and I will host our respective presentations. And we have a lot of work underway.  There will be 13 languages involved, and we have a lot of work that’s bearing fruit for the events in each of the locations.  And this will be designed to present the full truth, scope, and impact of the climate crisis and discuss the solutions to it and again it will be the first of a series of large events that we will hold multiple times a year to mobilize the public around actions to solve the climate crisis.  Each global event will focus on a different facet of the crisis and its solutions.  And we’re pretty excited about it.

Gore also told me “it’s urgent to rendezvous with reality in order to take the appropriate steps to save the future of civilization as we know it.”

The denial will hit the fan — as one amusing new video from the Project makes clear:

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Today, House Republicans crowed over the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a company with an innovative thin-film solar technology granted a $535 million loan guarantee under the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Massive investments by the Chinese government drove down the price of polysilicon and pushed Solyndra into bankruptcy at the beginning of this month, despite annual revenues of over $100 million a year. The company is now under investigation by the FBI, likely because of assurances made to Congress by its top officials that Solyndra was in good financial health.

At a hearing today, Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee questioned administration officials about the loan guarantee, and pontificated in general that government investment in clean technology was a bad idea. Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Koch Industries’ man in Congress, also asked questions at the hearing even though he is not a member of the subcommittee. These Republicans, unsurprisingly, are heavily funded by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries:

“The solar industry is truly dependent on subsidies,” subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL) said at the conclusion of the hearing. Stearns did not express similar outrage about the hundreds of billions of dollars that have gone into subsidizing the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries. None of the Republican members of the panel worried about the $11 million in subsidies they have received from the fossil fuel and nuclear industries in campaign contributions.

White House regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has been working to change the Obama Administration’s stance on various regulations.  The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Sunstein teamed up with Obama Chief of Staff Bill Daley to squash the long-delayed and much-needed ozone standard.

So if Sunstein thinks a regulatory moratorium would be catastrophic, that’s saying something.  Republicans, of course, have stepped up their attacks on regulations to unprecedented levels. Congressional Republicans and presidential hopefuls have made repeated calls for a moratorium on all regulations, and threaten to close the EPA on a daily basis.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the White House was also considering a full moratorium on EPA regulations. But PoliticoPro reported today that Cass Sunstein, head of the Administration’s office of regulatory affairs, is denying those reports.

For one thing, “A moratorium would not be a scalpel or a machete, it would be more like a nuclear bomb, in the sense that it would prevent regulations that, let’s say, cost very little, and have very significant economic or public health benefits,” he said.

A moratorium would also block the executive branch from its duty to carry out laws passed by Congress, he added. “A moratorium would violate the requirement of laws to be faithfully executed, so it would have to be a highly qualified moratorium.” A time out on rules would also prevent some deregulatory efforts because they are considered regulatory actions, Sunstein said.

It must be said, however, that Sunstein’s own efforts have undermined the ability of  the president to make the case for regulations.  National Journal recently conducted a poll of energy industry insiders, who expressed concern that the smog decision will open up the door to more delays of Environmental Protection Agency standards: Read more

by Kiley Kroh

Americans consume approximately 700 million farmed oysters per year.  Despite our love for these briny bivalves, shellfish and the coastal communities that depend on them face serious threats.

In a recent piece, Eric Scigliano examines “The Great Oyster Crash” of 2007, in which oyster seed (larvae) off the coast of Oregon and Washington began dying by the millions, seemingly without cause.  After taking aggressive measures to eliminate bacteria in the tanks, and failing to halt their losses, the owners began to suspect the problem was a more fundamental change in the makeup of the oceans.  With the help of local scientists, they found that their losses were directly linked to a far more ominous phenomenon: ocean acidification.

As Scigliano explains, “the oceans are the world’s great carbon sink, holding about 50 times as much of the element as the air.”  As carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes rise, so too does the level of acidity in the oceans.  Once it reaches a certain threshold, ocean acidification becomes lethal to many species, including clams and oysters, which become unable to build the shells or skeletons they need to survive.

The rise in acidity and subsequent oyster crash took a significant toll on coastal communities – from 2005 to 2009, West Coast production dropped from 93 million pounds to 73 million pounds, representing  $11 million in lost sales. This case is among the earliest examples of ocean acidification imposing a direct effect on the economy. Unfortunately, we can safely say it is far from the last.

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress

Groups of westerners in California, Nevada, and New Mexico recently staged events to call for an end to government handouts to Big Oil. These activities come as discussion of oil subsidies as a potential source of revenue for the country heats up. The newly-created Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, also known as the “super-committee,” had its first meeting last week, and ending oil subsidies could be on the table. Additionally, President Obama’s American Jobs Act includes the elimination of oil and tax breaks as an important pay-for measure.

Activists focused their attention on elected officials in Congress, who have the power to eliminate subsidies to profitable oil companies. As an organizer in a video courtesy of Progress Now Nevada put it:

We’re here today to send a message to Nevada Senator Dean Heller and anyone else in Congress that thinks it’s a good idea to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to these huge oil and gas corporations at the expense of Nevada seniors. So take action today and tell Senator Dean Heller it’s time to stop giving away the store to big oil and gas and it’s time to start protecting Nevada seniors.

Watch it:

Activists have employed a variety of tactics to get their message across to members of Congress and educate the public. Nevadans put up a billboard on a well-traveled highway between Reno and Carson City. Demonstrators in California held a rally at a local gas station and attended a town hall meeting for Representative Tom McClintock (R-CA) carrying their anti-subsidies message. And New Mexicans highlighted the work of Representative Martin Heinrich (D-NM) on oil and gas as a “voice of reason” in Washington and urged other members of Congress to speak out too.

The work of these citizens builds on the success of other events in Montana and Colorado this summer. The overall sentiment that Big Oil companies should pay their fair share is supported by national polling, which found that 74% of Americans support ending subsidies to oil and gas.

The Big Five oil companies raked in $67 billion in just the first half of this year. As Congressman John Garamendi said in a statement supporting a rally in his district, “I believe it is foolish to find savings as some have proposed – by ending commonsense environmental regulations, by cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits, by laying off teachers, by cutting off funds to needed infrastructure – when we can easily save $44 billion right now by ending wasteful subsidies to Big Oil.”

by Jonathan Rothwell and Mark Muro, Brookings Institution, in a repost

Several pundits and writers have recently suggested that the green economy is small and unlikely to be a major source of job growth anytime in the near future. So, the argument goes, it’s not a worthy investment.

As evidence for the first claim, some critics of green policies have cited the job growth figures from our recent “Sizing the Clean Economy” report while arguing that the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar photovoltaic manufacturer, illustrates both the failures of green policies and the weakness of the industry. We have discussed why we don’t interpret the Solyndra case, as one of over 120 solar PV manufacturers in the United States, to mean the industry is not worthy of public support.

But here’s another angle: In assessing the “green job” or “cleantech” debate this fall, we see intriguing analogies with the IT sector, which was also once a small nascent industry with somewhat obscure origins in the Defense Department. IT production is credited by many economists with causing the tremendous economic boom of the 1990s.

To develop the analogy a bit more, let’s look at IT’s role in the 1990s boom in more detail.

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While Pennsylvania’s political leaders deliberately ignore the threat of greenhouse pollution, the state has been battered by extreme flooding worsened by global warming. Under Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA), Pennsylvania has withdrawn from the legal defense of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that on August 5 the state “withdrew from four cases” defending the endangerment rule:

According to federal court records, the state Aug. 5 withdrew from four cases it joined in 2010 in support of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment” rule. That ruling found that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollutants that contribute to climate change also jeopardize human health and should be regulated by limiting emissions from vehicles, power plants and other large stationary sources. Those four endangerment cases were filed by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, a Texas-based nonprofit association of industry and business interests, to challenge the EPA’s first-ever rule regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Pennsylvania and 15 other states had intervened on behalf of the EPA.

Since then, “rainfall totaling one foot or more caused the Susquehanna River to surge to unprecedented levels – besting the benchmark flood for the region, which occurred as a result of Hurricane Agnes in 1972,” Andrew Freedman reports. “Harrisburg received 13.30 inches of rain, and a whopping 15.20 inches fell in Lancaster County during Sept. 5-8.”

At least 11 people in Pennsylvania were killed, thousands of homes damaged or destroyed, and farms throughout the state crippled by the floodwaters.

Dave Bollinger, outreach coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice that weather is getting more extreme, more often. “What’s happening is a 345-year flood you aren’t supposed to have is happening every 50 years,” he said. “We are seeing the effects of changing weather patterns.”

“One of the most robust climate change predictions is for more intense rainfall and flooding, due to the simple fact that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, meaning there is greater potential for heavy precipitation,” climate scientist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress Green. “While specific weather events always contain a large random component — like a roll of the weather dice — we are loading those dice through the warming of the planet resulting from fossil fuel burning. We are seeing those loaded dice in action with the events that have unfolded this summer, including the record-setting flooding we are seeing in the eastern U.S.”

The EPA’s endangerment finding cites exactly this danger from increasing greenhouse gas pollution:

Increases in the frequency of heavy precipitation events are associated with increased risk of deaths and injuries as well as infectious, respiratory, and skin diseases. Floods are low-probability, high-impact events that can overwhelm physical infrastructure, human resilience, and social organization. Flood health impacts include deaths, injuries, infectious diseases, intoxications, and mental health problems.

The federal investigation into the BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster finds that cost-cutting measures by the oil giant led to the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The final report of the joint Coast Guard-Bureau of Ocean Energy investigation finds that BP and its contracting companies — Halliburton and Transocean — were responsible for the disaster that poisoned the Gulf Coast and crippled the region’s economy.

The “contributing causes” to the blowout at the Macondo prospect include “BP’s cost or time saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation”:

BP’s cost or time saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the Macondo blowout.

The failure of the rig crew to stop work on the Deepwater Horizon after encountering multiple hazards and warnings was a contributing cause of the Macondo blowout.

BP’s failure to fully assess the risks associated with a number of operational decisions leading up to the blowout was a contributing cause of the Macondo blowout.

BP’s failure to ensure all risks associated with operations on the Deepwater Horizon were as low as reasonably practicable was a contributing cause of the Macondo blowout.

BP’s failure to have full supervision and accountability over the activities associated with the Deepwater Horizon was a contributing cause of the Macondo blowout.

The report summarizes:

The loss of life at the Macondo site on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent pollution of the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 2010 were the result of poor risk management, last‐minute changes to plans, failure to observe and respond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response, and insufficient emergency bridge response training by companies and individuals responsible for drilling at the Macondo well and for the operation of the Deepwater Horizon.

Halliburton shares blame, the investigators find. “BP and Halliburton’s failure to perform the production casing cement job in accordance with industry‐accepted recommendations as defined in API RP 65 was a contributing cause of the blowout.” Transocean’s rig crew also made mistakes that led to the disaster. “The Deepwater Horizon crew’s (BP and Transocean) collective misinterpretation of the negative tests was a cause of the well control failure.”

Anyone here because of Friedman’s piece, start with this “Introduction to Climate Progress.”

Friedman has a great NY Times column today, “Is It Weird Enough Yet?“  He writes:

Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire — after the worst droughts on record have propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”

Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climateprogress.org blog: “As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.”

It really is high school physics.  But I suppose that, along with biology, will be censored in President Perry’s USA.  For the CP piece Friedman references, see “Hell and High Water Stoke Texas Blaze.”

Personally, I’ve never been thrilled with the term “global weirding,” mainly because “weirding” carries the connotation of “related to the supernatural” — with the origin of the word “weird” being  “Middle English werde, fate, having power to control fate, from Old English wyrd, fate.”

There is nothing supernatural about what’s going on, and we don’t need any supernatural powers to control our fate.

Still, some people are using the phrase — and what’s happening does appear weird (see Virginia Deluge Was an “Off the Charts Above a 1000-year Rainfall,” Says National Weather Service).  So I am interested in your thoughts on the phrase.

Here’s more from the piece:

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A round-up of top climate and energy stories. Please post links to more stories below.

The global companies with climate-smart strategies deliver double the returns of their rivals. But will this wisdom sink in fully before global warming really starts to rage?

Why low carbon means high profit

The global companies with the sharpest focus on climate change have rewarded their investors with double the average return of the world’s corporate titans. That’s the startling message from the Carbon Disclosure Project, which released its annual Global 500 report on Wednesday.

On behalf of over 550 investment companies, managing $71 trillion of assets between them, the CDP challenged the 500 biggest companies in the world by market capitalisation to reveal detailed information about their carbon footprints and the action they are taking to tackle and adapt to global warming: 404 (81%) responded.

The CDP then compared the total financial returns between January 2005 and May 2011 of the companies identified as “carbon performance leaders” against the average of all 500. The former generated a return of 86%, the latter 43%.

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by Rebecca Lefton

This summer, all eyes in Washington were focused on whether Congress would reach a deal on the debt ceiling. Though an agreement was reached just 48 hours before the deadline in early August, the process and final package reflect an ideologically driven political discourse that fails to address major long-term problems that ultimately will be more destructive to our nation’s well-being, such as poverty and inequality. The deal does nothing to address unemployment and it may be more damaging for long-term economic growth. And the debate overshadowed one of the greatest challenges of our time: climate change.

What follows is an outline of how the deal and budget negotiations could affect climate assistance and CAP’s proposals for appropriate U.S. funding going forward.

What’s in the deal?

Along with a $400 billion debt ceiling increase, $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years was tagged onto the agreement. The deal relied on huge cuts to discretionary spending, leaving revenues and entitlements largely untouched, including no new taxes on the wealthy and protecting oil subsidies.

The debt ceiling legislation also created a super committee tasked with finding another $1.5 trillion of deficit reduction by Thanksgiving. The super committee’s recommendations must be voted on in the House by December 9, 2011, and no later than December 23 in the Senate. There are no limits on the committee’s recommendations. If the super committee’s legislation is not approved by congressional leaders and the administration and enacted by January 15, 2012, $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts will be triggered.

Discretionary spending is capped at $1.043 trillion for fiscal year 2012 ($7 billion below FY 2011). Discretionary accounts, which represent one-third of the budget, took far and away the biggest hit. For the first two years, the deal assigned caps to two categories of discretionary spending: “security” and “nonsecurity.” International affairs, which includes climate assistance, humanitarian aid, and disaster response, is grouped in the security category.

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